 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 386, 3 January 2011 |
Happy new year and welcome to this year's first issue of DistroWatch Weekly! We start the year 2011 with an interview with Matthias Scheler, writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of the NetBSD Foundation, accompanied by a brief first-look review of the recently released NetBSD 5.1. Although the project is best-known for its extensive support for exotic processors and architectures, as the interview reveals, it does offer interesting and unique features even for more common hardware. Read on to find out more. The new year also means the usual statistical look at some of the data we have collected over the past year, a long list of releases that took place during the last two weeks and a Questions and Answers section which offers some advice for new Linux converts looking for good online resources to learn more about their new operating system. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com December 2010 donation is the gtkpod project. Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (19MB) and MP3 (40MB) formats
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Learning about NetBSD 5.1
 The NetBSD project isn't one which I've given much thought to over the years. Its reputation of being able to run on just about any architecture is something I consider amazing, but not specifically useful for my purposes. The project's famed flexibility, when placed against the backdrop of the rest of the open source community, brings to mind a contortionist in a room full of gymnasts: impressive, but not so much as to stand out from the crowd. Perhaps that's unfair, I am very much an outsider where NetBSD is concerned. Aside from my pleasant brush with Jibbed last year, I've never taken the time to properly investigate the project. Some prompting from readers after I reviewed OpenBSD caused me to take the latest release of NetBSD, version 5.1, for a test drive.
* * * * *
Before grabbing a copy of NetBSD I had the pleasure of exchanging some e-mails with Matthias Scheler who was kind enough to answer questions on behalf of the Board of Directors of the NetBSD Foundation.
DW: Could you start by giving us a little history on NetBSD? Where it came from and why the project was created?
MS: NetBSD took its roots from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Net/2 release and 386BSD. The NetBSD project was founded by Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass and Charles M. Hannum.
Frustration with the quality of patches in the wild and the inability to get patches included in 386BSD led to the founding of the NetBSD project in 1993. NetBSD's original focus was quality and architecture independence. Since then, in addition to the many developments within the project, NetBSD has imported changes from other sources, including 4.4BSD Lite. NetBSD has also been used as the basis of other derivatives, including Apple's Rhapsody and Force 10's FTOS.
DW: We recently saw the release of NetBSD 5.1. What new features were included in this release?
MS: Some of the highlights were:
- RAIDframe parity maps which reduce parity rewrite times from hours to minutes after an unclean shutdown
- X.Org updates for improved desktop experiences and support for more graphics hardware
- Improved support for non-graphics hardware
- Xen PAE dom0 support allows using NetBSD as the host machine
- Xen PCI pass-through support provides access to PCI(e) hardware for guest machines.
A full list of the changes can be found here.
DW: Aside from being very portable, what other attractions does NetBSD have? Who typically runs NetBSD (academics, server admins, researchers)?
MS: People building products especially value the well-designed nature of NetBSD. Our source code has a tendency to be stable, and vendors are not forced to rework their product source trees frequently. This leads to time-saving which leaves more resources for product development instead of keeping up with outside changes. Many people use NetBSD on embedded devices without realizing it because of the liberal licensing terms. It allows using NetBSD in device firmware without fanfare or hassle.
DW: In the past year we have seen efforts to lower the bar to trying the BSDs. The Jibbed project, for example, provides a live CD based on NetBSD. What do you think of these efforts? Are they attracting more people to your project?
MS: The Jibbed project receives a lot of positive feedback because it makes it very easy for people to try out NetBSD. It is also very popular with system administrators because it provides them with a powerful recovery tool. There are plans for a USB stick edition of Jibbed which will solve the space constraints and therefore provide a larger software collection. This will make it even more attractive for new users.
DW: Is there an advantage to running a server or desktop with NetBSD over FreeBSD or OpenBSD?
MS: We think NetBSD is attractive for a number of reasons:
- NetBSD has excellent support for SMP since the 5.0 release. It also supports more than 4 GB of memory on suitable architectures like AMD64 or UltraSPARC. Users are therefore able to get maximum performance out of modern hardware platforms.
- It is an excellent reference platform for developing portable software.
- Correctness, consistency and backwards compatibility are important design goals. As a result, users get a stable and dependable operating system.
- NetBSD provides extensive virtualization support using the Xen hypervisor. It can be run as a dom0 or para-virtualized domU of the amd64 or i386 port (with and without PAE support). It also supports PCI pass-through for direct hardware access by guest machines. Support for SMP in para-virtualized machines is planned for the NetBSD 6.0 release.
- NetBSD has full cross-building support for the base operating system and the bundled 3rd party software. This in combination with the small size of the core operating system makes NetBSD an ideal choice for embedded environments.
- NetBSD's basic distribution aims to provide a good compromise of resource usage and a rich feature set. For example, it provides LDAP support and the Lua scripting language.
DW: Do we know how many NetBSD users there are out there? Or how many developers?
MS: We honestly don't know how many NetBSD users are out there. But as we already noted above there are a lot of people who use NetBSD and don't even know it because NetBSD serves unobtrusively on one of their appliances. The NetBSD project has more than 200 active members at the moment. Those members have signed membership agreements with The NetBSD Foundation, and are able to contribute directly to the source code repository. However, there are many more external developers who contribute patches or features.
DW: What can we look forward to in NetBSD 5.2 or 6.0?
MS: NetBSD 6.0 will provide a lot of new features. The following are already available in the latest developer version, known as NetBSD-current:
- improved kernel modules supporting demand-loading
- kernel scalability improvements
- 64bit time_t. As is well known, a 32-bit time_t will roll over in the year 2038. This is starting to affect people already, since time_t is often used in calculations which go far into the future. A common example is mortgage calculations. NetBSD 6.0 will have a 64-bit time_t for all architectures, including 32-bit processors. What makes this impressive is that old binaries built with a 32-bit time_t will continue to function in NetBSD 6.0 and onwards. This is a good example of something made possible by clean design. It also demonstrates how design is perceived by users: things just work -- system design is noticeable only when it is not on a solid basis.
- DTrace, enhanced kernel debugging and profiling support
- Logical Volume Manager for flexible management of disk space
- automated tests
- much improved support for running kernel code as userland applications (puffs(4) and rump(4))
- native terminfo support
- NetPGP, a BSD licensed PGP/GPG program
- Xen balloon driver, for increasing/decreasing the available RAM for a domain while it is running
- UltraSPARC III(+) support (e.g., SunBlade 1000 and 2000)
- improved Linux emulation (compat_linux) now emulates a Linux 2.6 kernel and is compatible with glibc 2.10.
- MIPS 64bit support
- new and enhanced drivers
- a lot of updated and new 3rd party software (OpenSSL 1.1.0, OpenSSH 5.6, BIND 9.7.2-P3, X.org 1.9.2)
Features under development:
- ZFS, a port of the famous next-generation Solaris file system
- NILFS, a log-structured file-system
- in-kernel Lua support
- in-kernel iSCSI initiator
- NPF (New Packet Filter), a multiprocessor-safe network packet filter
- Thread Local Storage for enhanced Java Virtual Machine support
- Xen multi processor support for the host and para-virtualized guests
- ChewieFS, a flash file-system
- support for booting the kernel via HTTP
- GPT-aware boot loader for booting of hard disks larger than two terabyte
- SASL support for authenticated mail delivery
As the release cycle for NetBSD 5.2 is still in a very early stage it hasn't been determined what its feature set will be.
DW: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers concerning the project?
MS: The NetBSD project has successfully taken part in the Google Summer of Code for the sixth year in a row. The list with this year's projects can be found here. We are very pleased that all of our projects completed successfully.
To anyone out there who is interested in contributing to the project but isn't sure where to start: pkgsrc is a great way to get involved. There are so many packages out there, and only a finite number of developers to import and maintain them. Consider submitting PRs [problem reports] against pkgsrc and joining the pkgsrc-wip project. You can find more information here and here.
I would like to thank Matthias Scheler for his time and informative answers. It's obvious there is a lot of new work going into the NetBSD project.
* * * * *
I began my experiment with NetBSD by launching the install disc in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The CD brought up a menu asking if I would like to perform an install, attempt to install with no ACPI support or, alternatively, install with no ACPI support and no SMP support. Regardless of which option I selected, the virtual machine would then lock-up. This wasn't entirely surprising as I had a similar issue when I tested the latest OpenBSD release last month.
Next I decided to try NetBSD on my HP laptop (dual-core 2GHz CPU, 3GB of RAM, Intel video card) and things got off to a better start. Booting from the CD launched the system installer (sysinst), which guides the user through the installation process with text menus. While the layout is fine, I found some of the steps a bit unusual, or maybe it's just the terminology. At any rate, readers may recall that when I reviewed OpenBSD I found the installer was very simple, just text prompts and typing out answers. Yet, with OpenBSD, the user can almost get away with pressing Enter at each prompt and make it through. NetBSD's installer is, at a glance, pretty much the opposite. It has nice menus and a clean layout, but there were times I found myself reading and re-reading a question to make sure I got the gist of it.
The installer starts out by asking for our preferred language and keyboard layout. We then choose whether we want to perform a fresh install, an upgrade or re-install the same system. When asked whether I wanted a full, minimum or custom installation, I opted for "full" and then got into partitioning the hard disk. The partition manager is one of the pieces of the installer which has an unusual layout, but I found it worked well enough. The next step is to confirm we want to install a boot loader and then we provide the location of our install packages (in my case, this was the CD drive). From there, the installer asks us some more questions, requesting the local time zone and the kind of hash we want to use to store passwords. The process concludes by requesting we provide a root password and select a shell for the root user. There is no creation of a regular user account.
Once the installation had completed, I rebooted my laptop and discovered the machine would not boot. I got as far as selecting NetBSD from the boot menu and then things came to a stop. Running through the installer again, taking the defaults wherever possible, did nothing to cure my laptop of its paralysis. My next step was to try out NetBSD on a desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card). As before, I went through the install process and, this time, NetBSD booted from my hard drive. I logged in and received a message suggesting that I create a non-root account and use the "su" command, rather than operating as root on a regular basis. Following the advice, I set up a new user, manually created a home directory for the user and set a password.
Looking around, I found NetBSD had installed just under 500 MB of software on my system and, while running from the command line, I was using a bare 10 MB of memory. Further, there were about a dozen processes running, a remarkably low number when we consider a modern Linux distribution often runs in the range of one hundred processes in the background. The trade off, of course, is that NetBSD isn't doing anything for us out of the box. For instance, NetBSD comes with X installed, but if we want to use a window manager as a non-root user, we have to do some configuring. There isn't any desktop environment with the usual conveniences, not by default, but we do have a simple window manager.
The Internet connection is not enabled by default, and this is where NetBSD's documentation is handy to have. In places the manual is a bit sparse, it's assumed we know our way around a command line and how to edit configuration files, but the documentation available is to the point and covers the important topics. The package manager isn't set up for us, we need to point the system to the proper server and remote directories where NetBSD keeps its packages. Fortunately the steps to do all of this are also covered in the documentation. Compared to some other repositories, NetBSD's list of packages is small (there are 9,523 packages available), but it contains the popular software and the basics needed to run a modern OS.
Unfortunately my experience with NetBSD was cut short. As I mentioned earlier, NetBSD didn't enable my network connection by default, this is something which had to be set up manually. And, following the documentation, things seemed to progress smoothly. I set up my network interface, got an IP address and was able to connect to the outside world. However, the connection wasn't stable. Pings to remote hosts would often drop packets and downloads would lose their connections, making installing new software impractical. I had a similar issue with OpenBSD at one time and I think the problem stems from my hardware. To date I haven't been able to get a steady connection.
At any rate, I was left to explore what I could of NetBSD from what was available at install time. As the whole system, X and all, takes up less than 500 MB of disk space, it's obvious there won't be a long list of features. Most of the install is the usual collection of UNIX tools that are available on any Linux/BSD machine. We also find GCC (version 4.1.3), which is a bit dated but still very useful. The OpenSSH tools are included, which provide secure shell and (my specific case aside) secure file transfers.
Having tinkered with NetBSD for the past few days, I feel that the project's highly valued flexibility may also be one of its biggest drawbacks for desktop adoption. The system is so flexible and so willing to shy away from being bogged down with extra packages and assumptions, that it doesn't do much of anything out of the box. This minimalist approach does allow NetBSD to run on an amazing number of architectures (57, if I counted correctly) and it requires surprisingly few resources, but these points also mean a person who installs NetBSD must be willing to spend time configuring and installing everything he or she wants. This isn't the sort of operating system you slap on a PC in twenty minutes, it turns into more of a full afternoon project. If having an incredibly light, highly flexible system that you build on from the ground up sounds appealing, then I am happy to report NetBSD may very well be the system for you.
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| Statistics (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics in 2009 and 2010
With the end of 2010, here is a quick look at the movers and shakers of the past year, with the help of our Page Hit Ranking statistics. At first glance there isn't much that has changed over the last 12 months - Ubuntu and its derivatives (notably Linux Mint) continue to dominate the charts, while Fedora, with its strong effort to involve the community and the addition of "spins" to its line-up, comes at a somewhat distant second spot. Indeed, at times it does seem that the distro world is a two-horse race between these two heavyweights. The other main distributions with regular releases, openSUSE and Mandriva, which used to belong to the "big four" group, are slowly but surely starting to fall off the radar (even though they still attract a noticeable following). With openSUSE, uncertainty surrounding the sale of Novell and slower release cycle are probably the main factors behind the slide, while Mandriva's resurgent financial troubles, developer lay-offs and eventually a fork under the name of Mageia will likely result in further drops in interest in the coming year.
Looking through the tables, an interesting thing is the rise of distributions that use the lightweight, but full-featured LXDE desktop or the Openbox window manager. As an example, Lubuntu now comfortably beats Kubuntu in terms of page hits, while CrunchBang Linux, a lightweight distribution with Openbox is still in the top 25 even though it failed to produce a stable release for well over a year. Many other distributions started offering LXDE-based editions of their products, further contributing to the dramatic rise in popularity of this relatively new desktop environment. One other note of interest - Red Hat Enterprise Linux has climbed to the top 25 list for the first time in five years - largely due to its long-awaited release of version 6 in November 2010.
As always, the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics shouldn't be taken too seriously - they are a fun way of looking at what's hot and what's not among this site's visitors, but they probably do not reflect install base or distribution quality. For a look at what DistroWatch visitors use while browsing these pages please see the Awstats output of our web server data.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Online Linux resources
New-in-town asks: I just completed my first Linux install. Where do I go to learn more and get help?
DistroWatch answers: I got this question a little while ago and I'm sorry to say it's taken me some time to respond. Now, with the new year rolling in, this seems like a good time to answer. Unfortunately I found myself a bit stumped. It's been over ten years since I wandered into the Linux community. At the time I mostly relied on textbooks and IRC. Many of the helpful websites and distributions which we have now didn't exist then, so I'm not sure where newcomers generally go. My suggestion is to first visit your distribution's forum. If you've picked a distro and managed to install it, then the forum associated with your distro of choice is probably the best place to start asking questions. I find browsing through a general section of a forum is a good way to find out about common issues and their solutions.
For people who haven't picked a distro to install yet, you can go over to this website, answer a few questions about your computer experience and what you're looking for, and it will give you a short list of recommended Linux distributions.
Bruce Patterson, whose name you may recognize from the DistroWatch Weekly Podcast, told me he found LinuxQuestions.org to be a helpful resource. Bruce also mentioned Linux Basix as a place where people can go to learn more about Linux and open source. Though Linux Basix is a fairly new community, they have friendly forums and some interesting podcasts containing discussions on all things Linux.
For specific cases, I find plugging an error message into Google can be very helpful. If you don't mind some extra traffic in your inbox, project mailings lists can be helpful too. A little while back I asked a new-to-Linux user where they went to learn about their operating system and they told me, I suspect a bit tongue-in-cheek, that DistroWatch is a good place to learn about Linux. Last, but not least, if someone you know introduced you to Linux, feel free to use them as your first-tier tech support.
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| Released During the Last Two Weeks |
Chakra GNU/Linux 0.3.0
Phil Miller has announced the release of Chakra GNU/Linux 0.3.0, an Arch-based distribution and live CD showcasing the latest KDE desktop. From the release announcement: "This release features the brand new KDE SC 4.5.4 plus the option to install our popular Click'n'Run applications through 'tribe'. We updated all our tools and fixed lots of bugs you and we found. Tribe can now create more than one user account again. This time you can add your personal avatar to each account. For the first time you can customize your installation. We added two lists of our popular packages and bundles to choose from. Tribe got translated to Catalan, German, Italian and Spanish. Good news about CCR, our community repository: you can find now over 378 packages added by our users."
Chakra GNU/Linux 0.3.0 - an Arch-based distribution with KDE
(full image size: 848kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Zorin OS 4
Artyom Zorin has announced the release of Zorin OS 4, an easy-to-use Ubuntu-based distribution designed for Linux beginners: "The Zorin OS team is proud to announce the availability of the 'Core' and 'Premium' editions of Zorin OS designed for Linux beginners. In addition to the easy-to-use interface and our unique Look Changer, Zorin OS 4 incorporates such new tools and features as the improved file manager, file previews and the redesigned sound menu which help you to get more done in less time while our splash screen manager, our Internet browser manager and the refined software center make performing customization tasks even easier. We have made changes to the core system which makes Zorin OS 4 even faster than Ubuntu. We have created new desktop and splash screen themes to further improve Zorin OS' appearance." Read the release announcement and release notes for more details.
Zorin OS 4 - an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution with enhanced usability
(full image size: 1,193kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Sabayon Linux 5.4 "Gaming"
Fabio Erculiani has announced the release of Sabayon Linux 5.4 "Gaming" edition. From the list of features: "Based on Sabayon Linux 5.4 GNOME; featuring Linux Kernel 2.6.36 and all the bells and whistles that are in our repositories as of today; remastered thanks to Sabayon's little helper called 'molecule'; filled with gazillions of games - the best free and open-source games of the Linux land, including 0ad, Alien Arena 2011, Battle of Wesnoth, FooBillard, Freeciv, Frozen Bubble, GNOME Games, M.A.R.S. a ridiculous shooter, Micropolis, NeverBall, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Pingus, PyChess, Scorched 3D, Simutrans, Spring, Stepmania, Torcs, Tremulous, Warsow, Warzone 2100 and Wormux." Read the festive release announcement for further information.
Zentyal 2.0-3
Heidi Vilppola has announced the release of Zentyal 2.0-3, an updated version of the Ubuntu-based server distribution for small and medium-sized companies: "The development team of Zentyal, the Linux small business server previously known as eBox Platform, is glad to announce the availability of Zentyal 2.0-3 installer. This is a new compilation of all the latest Zentyal packages as well as the last system updates from Ubuntu. Please note that this installer comes with a new Zentyal Cloud-based feature - you can see a new 'Disaster Recovery' entry in the installer menu. This option allows users with a free Basic Server subscription to automatically install the modules from a previously stored configuration backup. Another mayor change in the installer is the switch from slim to LXDM as display manager." Here is the full release announcement.
Mandriva Linux 2010.2
Eugeni Dodonov has announced the release of Mandriva Linux 2010.2: "Welcome the Mandriva 2010.2 release which is coming to a mirror nearby you right now. As announced previously, Mandriva 2010.2 is an incremental update on top of Mandriva 2010.1, incorporating all the security and bug-fix updates since its release. Just to give you some statistics about what changes in 2010.2 when comparing to 2010.1, these are some of the numbers. Since the 2010.1 release, the security team has released a total of 5,055 RPMs via official updates, counting both security and bug-fix advisories, across 272 different packages. With such a big number of updated packages, we decided to release an updated version incorporating these packages." Read the complete release announcement on the official Mandriva blog.
LinuxConsole 1.0.2010
Yann Le Doare has released LinuxConsole Linux 1.0.2010, an independent distribution with the goal of being as easy-to-use as a game console. Features: "Very fast boot - using Dash instead of Bash, using initramfs instead of initrd, modules management completely rewritten (no more cache, all modules mounted once), LXDE is started in 4 seconds when booting CD in VirtualBox; LXDE/PCManFM now default session; IceWM/Rox Filer can also be used; LXLauncher will be used for the game center; new module management with lcmtool; new tools - select time zone, wicd can be used to set up wireless connexions; install it on live CD or live USB; applications - latest Firefox, Thunderbird, Flash player, X.Org Server 1.9.2, Linux kernel 2.6.35.8, BusyBox 1.17.2, NVIDIA driver 260.19.29...." For further details please see the full release announcement.
KNOPPIX 6.4.3
Klaus Knopper has announced the release of KNOPPIX 6.4.3, a popular Debian-based live CD/DVD (featuring the lightweight LXDE desktop) which has recently celebrated its 10th birthday: "The anniversary edition of KNOPPIX is now available as a DVD and CD image." New features in this release: "The current version has been completely updated from Debian 'Lenny', 'Testing' and 'Unstable' and uses Linux kernel 2.6.36.1, X.Org 7.5 for supporting current computer hardware; experimental free nouveau graphics modules supporting NVIDIA cards; accelerated graphics via kernel mode settings (KMS); OpenOffice.org replaced by LibreOffice 3.3.0; Process Control Group support for terminal shells." Read the rest of the release notes for a list of new features, known issues and boot options.
KNOPPIX 6.4.3 - a new version of the popular Debian-based live CD and DVD
(full image size: 675kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Linux Mint 201012 "Debian"
Clement Lefebvre has announced the availability of a new build of the "Debian" edition of Linux Mint, a rolling-release distribution based on Debian's "Testing" branch: "What a better time than Christmas to bring all the best from 2010 into an updated release of Linux Mint 'Debian'. All Mint 10 features; 64-bit support; performance boost (using cgroup, the notorious '4 lines of code better than 200' in user-space); installer improvements (multiple HDDs, GRUB install on partitions, swap allocation, Btrfs support); better fonts (using Ubuntu's libcairo, fontconfig and Ubuntu Font Family) and language support; better connectivity and hardware support; better sound support (addressing conflicts between Pulse Audio and Flash); updated software and packages." The release announcement includes a brief FAQ and additional release notes.
Finnix 101
Ryan Finnie has announced the release of Finnix 101, a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian's 'testing' branch: "Today marks the eggnog-induced release of Finnix 101, the seventeenth release of Finnix since its beginnings over ten years ago. Finnix 101 includes major behind-the-scenes architectural changes, the re-introduction of PowerPC support, new features, and minor bug fixes. After a show of public support, Finnix is once again producing PowerPC releases. While using Finnix still has its same familiar look, much of the core infrastructure which comprises Finnix has been re-engineered. Many of the changes are intended to make development and re-development (remastering) easier and more powerful, and to help with deployment by Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers." For further details please read release announcement and the detailed release notes.
MoLinux 6.2
MoLinux 6.2, an Ubuntu-based distribution sponsored by the Spanish regional government of Castilla-La Mancha and deployed extensively in the region's public administration offices and schools, has been released. Some of the most important features of the new version include: based on Ubuntu 10.10; new window design for the log-in screen; new icon theme (GNOME-Wine); hardware compatibility improvements; latest versions of applications included in the distributions; new applications and utilities such as JDownloader, a download manager, Gnome Subtitles, a subtitle editor, support for 7zip file compression in File Roller; miscellaneous improvements added to existing applications such as Nanny, a parental control utility or Hamster Applet, a time manager. Please refer to the release announcement and the comprehensive release notes (both links in Spanish) for a detailed description of the new release.
MoLinux 6.2 - the latest version of the Spanish distribution is based on Ubuntu 10.10
(full image size: 1,061kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Salix OS 13.1.2 "LXDE"
George Vlahavas has announced the release of Salix OS 13.1.2 "LXDE" edition, a Slackware-based distribution featuring the lightweight LXDE desktop environment: "One year after our first 64-bit release we are proud to announce the release of Salix LXDE 13.1.2. This is a triple release and it includes a 32-bit installation image, a 64-bit installation image as well as a 32-bit live CD. The most evident change in Salix LXDE 13.1.2 is that it is the first release in the LXDE series that comes with a 64-bit image. Another important change is the inclusion of slapt-src, a new tool that makes the process of downloading and building software packages from SlackBuilds.org simple and easy. Thousands of extra packages are now available through this new tool for our users." Read the rest of the release announcement to learn about other changes in this release.
aptosid 2010-03
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann has announced the release of aptosid 2010-03, a Linux distribution based on Debian's unstable branch, but using a newer Linux kernel with improved hardware support: "Now that kernel 2.6.36.2 has entered the archive with many KMS-related bug fixes, we have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the final aptosid 2010-03 'Apate' release. New features are in particular kernel 2.6.36.2 and numerous integration and stabilization fixes after the rename. Kernel 2.6.36.2 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also features improved KMS support for ATI Radeon and Intel graphics cards and performance improvements for Intel Westmere graphics chipsets. WLAN support has been consolidated, with rt2x00 now supporting Ralink rt28x0/ rt30xx/ rt35xx officially." Read the detailed release notes for more information.
aptosid 2010-03 - a Linux distribution and live CD based on Debian's unstable branch
(full image size: 438kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Tuquito 4.1
Mario Colque has announced the release of Tuquito 4.1, an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution from Argentina. The biggest change of the new release, now based on Ubuntu 10.10, is the availability of a lightweight, CD edition of Tuquito featuring the LXDE desktop with the Openbox window manager. Other improvements include: update to GNOME 2.32; new welcome screen with the possibility of switching between different editions of the product; better selection of default applications; Linux kernel 2.6.35; faster boot; support for touchscreens; improvements in CPU and RAM consumption in applications and during system boot; new control centre with new modes (normal and advanced); re-introduction of Pidgin as a replacement of Empathy.... Please see the full release announcement (in Spanish) to learn more.
Puppy Linux 5.0 "Wary"
Barry Kauler has announced the release of Puppy Linux "Wary" edition, a distribution for older hardware. Despite the name, this is NOT an Ubuntu-based distribution, but an independently developed distro with support for installing packages from Ubuntu repositories. From the release announcement: "Puppy Linux 'Wary' is a parallel development to our other flagship Puppy, Luci Puppy, but with a different target market - older hardware. Puppies built with recent Linux kernel and X.Org may not work properly on older computers. In particular, some analog dial-up modem drivers cannot be compiled with recent kernels. Another major area is old video hardware not working with latest X.Org drivers. Wary is built with an old kernel (currently 2.6.31.14) and X.Org 7.3 so as to provide better drivers for the older hardware. However, Wary is in all other respects at the leading-edge like the other puppies, with recent applications, and support for all modern peripherals."
Parted Magic 5.8
Patrick Verner has announced the release of Parted Magic 5.8, a specialist Linux-based live CD designed for disk partitioning and data rescue tasks: "After several months of work, a new version is ready for release. Many bugs have been fixed and many core programs have been updated. You will notice the Linux 2.6.36 kernel and the newest version of the Gnome Partition Editor (GParted). There is also a mess of new stuff as well. Parted Magic now includes the SciTE text editor. For the first time the ISO image can be fully loaded into RAM and booted. This means, for example, that the default syslinux menu can be used for a PXE boot. The following programs have been updated: Clonezilla 1.2.6-40, Linux kernel 2.6.36.2, BusyBox 1.17.4, SimpleBurn 1.6.0, ClamAV 0.96.5, e2fsprogs 1.41.14, GParted 0.7.1." Visit the project's news page to read the full release announcement.
VortexBox 1.7
Andrew Gillis has announced the release of VortexBox 1.7, a Fedora-based Linux distribution with the ability to turn an unused computer into an easy-to-use music server or jukebox: "We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.6. One of the most common feature requests we get is for the ability to rip DVD movies. VortexBox users have already ripped their large CD collections to VortexBox now they want to add their DVD collections as well. VortexBox delivers. VortexBox can now auto-detect CDs or DVDs and rip accordingly. All you need to do is insert a DVD movie into the VortexBox and it will be automatically ripped to MKV format. This is great for all the new media players such as Logitech Revue, Boxee Box, Windows Media Center, and XBMC. We have also added the latest version of SqueezeBox Server (7.4.2) and a bunch of other fixes and upgrades." Here is the brief release announcement.
Dragora GNU/Linux 2.1
Matias Fonzo has announced the release of Dragora GNU/Linux 2.1, a multi-purpose operating system built with free software: "I am pleased to announce the version 2.1 of Dragora GNU/Linux. Dragora is a powerful and reliable GNU/Linux distribution created from scratch with the intention of providing a stable, multi-platform and multi-purpose operating system. Built with 100% free software. The latest version is now available in a 64-bit edition. Featuring Runit as the default init scheme, a simple and powerful package system, Linux 'libre' 2.6.34.7, the GNU C Compiler Collection 4.5.1, and the GNU C library 2.12.1. Also, X.Org 7.6 with Xfce 4.8pre2 with patches, IceWM, and Scrotwm. The Bluetooth subsystem has been added, better printing support, along with scanner support. This version comes with Java through IcedTea 6, GNU IceCat 3.6.13 with Tor, Polipo and the development version of Gnash." A more complete changelog is available as part of the release announcement.
Linux Deepin 10.12
Linux Deepin 10.12, a Chinese Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the GNOME desktop and numerous usability enhancements, such as Mint menu and the Mac OS X-like Cairo-Dock panel for application launch, has been released. Some of the more interesting new features in this version include: a much improved Chinese input method called Yong; Yozo Office 2009 SP1, a locally developed office suite with a look and feel of Microsoft Office; new font selector offering a choice between the default WenQuanYi font and the Windows XP-like ClearType fonts; introduction of the space-saving "global menu" feature, neatly integrated into the top panel with window controls; a brand-new icon theme. Please see the detailed release notes (in Chinese) which contain several screenshots to illustrate some of the concepts.
Linux Deepin 10.12 - a Chinese distribution based on Ubuntu
(full image size: 765kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Grml 2010.12
Michael Prokop has announced the release of Grml 2010.12, a bootable live system based on Debian with a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators: "Grml 2010.12, code name 'Gebrueder' is available. New features: new Linux kernel version based on 2.6.36.2; config-less X to take advantage of X.Org's automatic configuration; support for Kernel Mode Setting (KMS); grml-rescueboot / loopback.cfg feature and grub-imageboot for ISO boot; initial release of Kantan, an automated testing suite for continuous integration and a test environment; incremental grml-rebuildfstab triggered by udev events for faster execution time; improved serial console on multiple devices; vnc_connect boot option allowing to connect to an existing listening VNC client...." Read the rest of the release notes for further details.
moonOS 4
Chanrithy Thim has announced the release of moonOS 4, an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution with a custom file hierarchy and a new experimental application framework: "The team is proud to announce the release of moonOS 4. New features: updated software, refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use; uses GNOME as the default desktop environment; own file hierarchy system; new applications framework - an software that uses the Appshell framework will be standalone so everyone can download a single package and install and share with friends via a Flash driver (this is in experiment so there are limited application ports at the moment); includes the popular '200 lines' kernel patch to boost the speed; careful selection of applications for daily use; Docky and Synapse for life even more easy...." Read the release notes for more details and some screenshots.
moonOS 4 - an Ubuntu-based distribution with some interesting experimental features
(full image size: 1,986kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
SystemRescueCd 2.0.0
François Dupoux has released version 2.0.0 of SystemRescueCd, a Gentoo-based live CD designed for data rescue and disk management tasks. What's new? "Standard kernels based on the long-term supported 2.6.35 kernel (2.6.35.10); alternative kernels based on the more recent 2.6.36 kernel (2.6.36.2); the Squashfs file system is now compressed using XZ instead of LZMA; updated firmware in both the initramfs and in the main file system; nouveau is the new default video driver for NVIDIA cards; updated GNU Parted to version 2.3 with patches from Ubuntu 10.10; updated GParted to 0.7.1 (fixes names with dmraid and mount points paths); updated FSArchiver to 0.6.12 (fixes possible problems to save the rootfs); updated initramfs software (programs involved in the boot process); updated Aufs file system to version 2.1; updated X.Org Server to 1.9.3 (graphical server and drivers)...." Here is the full changelog.
Zorin OS 4 "Lite"
Artyom Zorin has announced the release of Zorin OS 4 "Lite" edition, a lightweight, Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the LXDE desktop: "The Zorin OS team is proud to announce the availability of the first version of Zorin OS 'Lite'. This new edition of Zorin OS was designed to provide one of the fastest and most feature-packed interfaces for low-specification machines thanks to the lightweight LXDE desktop environment. We have included many exclusive programs and features such as our new look changer tailored especially for the LXDE environment which includes the Windows 2000 and the Mac OS X looks, the Internet browser manager, the desktop theme and many others." Read the release announcement and release notes for additional information.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
December 2010 DistroWatch.com donation: gtkpod
We are happy to announce that the recipient of the December 2010 DistroWatch.com donation is the gtkpod iPod Manager project, an easy-to-use graphical software application that makes it possible to manage files on an iPod under Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. It receives US$250.00 in cash.
For those readers who use Linux and own an iPod, gtkpod is an indispensable application; it allows Linux users to manage their sound, video and photo collection on their iPods from within a nice graphical user interface: "gtkpod is a platform-independent graphical user interface for Apple's iPod using GTK+. It allows you to import an existing iTunes database, add songs, podcasts, videos and cover art, and to edit ID3 tags." Besides gtkpod, the project also releases libgpod, a library allowing direct access to the iPod's contents. Currently the latest version is 1.0.0 released in August 2010, but the developers work actively on a much improved gtkpod 2.0.0, which will be a substantial code rewrite. More information can be found on the project's home page.
Launched in 2004, this monthly donations programme is a DistroWatch initiative to support free and open-source software projects and operating systems with cash contributions. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite project for future donations. Those readers who wish to contribute towards these donations, please use our advertising page to make a payment (PayPal and credit cards are accepted). Here is the list of the projects that have received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):
- 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF - Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
- 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NDISwrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
- 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a Powerpack competition), Digikam ($408) and Sabayon Linux ($450)
- 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400), FreeNAS ($350), lighttpd ($400), Damn Small Linux ($350), NimbleX ($450), MEPIS Linux ($300), Zenwalk Linux ($300)
- 2008: VLC ($350), Frugalware Linux ($340), cURL ($300), GSPCA ($400), FileZilla ($400), MythDora ($500), Linux Mint ($400), Parsix GNU/Linux ($300), Miro ($300), GoblinX ($250), Dillo ($150), LXDE ($250)
- 2009: Openbox ($250), Wolvix GNU/Linux ($200), smxi ($200), Python ($300), SliTaz GNU/Linux ($200), LiVES ($300), Osmo ($300), LMMS ($250), KompoZer ($360), OpenSSH ($350), Parted Magic ($350) and Krita ($285)
- 2010: Qimo 4 Kids ($250), Squid ($250), Libre Graphics Meeting ($300), Bacula ($250), FileZilla ($300), GCompris ($352), Xiph.org ($250), Clonezilla ($250), Debian Multimedia ($280), Geany ($300), Mageia ($470), gtkpod ($250)
Since the launch of the Donations Program in March 2004, DistroWatch has donated a total of US$26,630 to various open-source software projects.
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
- Saline OS. Saline OS is a lightweight and fast open-source operating system built on the Debian GNU/Linux repositories and using the Xfce desktop environment. Saline OS is still in beta, working towards its first release.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 10 January 2011.
Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • happy new year (by Anonymous on 2011-01-03 09:19:30 GMT from United States)
happy new year to the DWW team and all its readers, a big thank you for the intersting new year's first issue, and keep up the great work.
2 • BSD (by Stricken on 2011-01-03 09:32:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
Until the question of whether the CIA or anyone else has placed a backdoor in BSD has been addressed, no-one is going to use it. To find the truth about this some say is impossible, others say could take a very long time. Why didn't you ask Mattie, Jesse?!
Most likely M$ has dozens of exploits of benefit to themselves and the Administration. As for Linux, it seems unlikely, although it might've been preferable for Linus to continue his work in Finland?!
3 • Happy New Year (by Tom on 2011-01-03 10:13:33 GMT from United Kingdom)
Happy New Year to everyone. :)
The back-pages still show OpenOffice rather than LibreOffice. Is that single row going to be used for both? Perhaps the version numbers could start with L or O?
how many distros have moved to LibreOffice already?
Regards from Tom :)
4 • Mandriva (by OssT on 2011-01-03 10:24:06 GMT from United Kingdom)
I am kind of sad to see that this distribution is starting to fall down the list. When I first started using linux it was redhat 7.x and i was playing around with, what it was called then, mandrake and learnt a bit about linux from it.
I hope it continues to do well even though their financial situation is a bit worrying. Will be interesting to see how well the spin-off distribution does.
5 • Stricken (by JokerBoy on 2011-01-03 10:38:58 GMT from Romania)
2# Correction: OpenBSD, not every BSD OS. I think this is FUD..
6 • MicroSquish (by Tom on 2011-01-03 11:01:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
@5 & 2
IF MicroSquish DO have back-doors in other operating systems then lets hope they are as reliable and stable as it's other projects.
I doubt people will stop using it. People don't suddenly stop using MicroSquish en-masse just because it gets easily infected and compromised. I imagine there is a lot of work going on to find and correct. There are still no examples of systems being compromised out in the wild but we have heard of new virusses (virii?) that only affect Windows systems (guessing anyway).
Regards from
Tom :)
7 • prizes (by Tom on 2011-01-03 11:17:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
It is great to see which projects have been given prizes by DW. A good choice of projects that really appreciate the prize money. Supporting key multimedia projects, and break-away projects and that nudge for LxDE have been excellent choices. LxDE has certainly paid-off! :)
I would like to nominate sliTaz for the prize because i have found them incredibly useful this last year. They don't really fit into the criteria of being about multimedia and they are not new but they have saved my hide many times.
Many thanks all and happy new year from Tom :)
8 • PCLinuxOS (by Barista Uno on 2011-01-03 11:37:20 GMT from Philippines)
I'm not surprised that PCLinuxOS inched up in the Distrowatch rankings from 8th to 6th spot, beating the venerable Mandriva. Out of curiousity, I recently installed PCLinuxOS 2010.2 lxde on an HP Pavilion desktop rig with 500MHz processor, 320MB RAM and very limited onboard video capability. PCLinuxOS has breathed new life into this ancient machine. I have now decided to use the unit as my day-to-day workstation. turning to my Atom-based netbook for occasional video-watching.
9 • Backdoors. Again, read & (try to) learn ... (by jake on 2011-01-03 11:39:53 GMT from United States)
Do backdoors exist in most/many major OSes?
The answer is that I don't know. Neither do you. Read my old mentor's paper:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Bottom line is that if you don't own/understand/grok the tool-chain at a ones & zeros level, you really don't know what is buried in it. Personally, I'm going to carry on carrying on, just as I have since I first realized the possibility back in the early 1980s ...
10 • #7 (by anticapitalista on 2011-01-03 11:40:25 GMT from N/A)
#7 Nothing against sliTaz, but it won an award in 2009. I would recommend a project that hasn't won before.
libTorrent and rTorrent maybe?
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/
11 • libtorrent (by OssT on 2011-01-03 12:08:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
From someone that uses rTorrent extensively on my website and for personal use, I would also be happy to see libtorrent get a donation from DW.
12 • gtkpod project (by ceti on 2011-01-03 12:51:44 GMT from Brazil)
Congrats to gtkpod for being the recipient of the December donation.
gtkpod is great, much better than the Apple software.
13 • Re:2 • BSD (by Stricken on 2011-01-03 09:32:49 GMT from United Kingdom) (by N.N. on 2011-01-03 13:44:36 GMT from United States)
Do you think that Linux is clean?
14 • No news? (by ix on 2011-01-03 13:48:40 GMT from Romania)
You usually have a news section. Where are the news? Weren't there any, for two weeks?
Happy new year!
15 • Fun HTPC project (by Michael Raugh on 2011-01-03 14:06:00 GMT from United States)
My new wife bought us a geeky gift over the holidays: a Giada N20. It's a ridiculously tiny form factor PC with dual-core Atom CPU and NVidia ION2 graphics system with HDMI out. Comes with no OS -- refreshing! -- so we downloaded and installed XBMC Live, which is a stripped-down Ubuntu that boots straight into the XBMC media center application.
She is a Windows user by profession but quickly agreed that we didn't want a fat OS on this tiny box. A dual-core Atom is still an Atom, after all; we wanted as much of its horsepower as possible going into serving up media. XBMC was fully functional within about 20 minutes, including time to install the distribution to the internal hard drive. "Fully functional" means playing a hi-def video stored on my CentOS server and being controlled by the remote that came with the Giada (and which, BTW, can power the unit on by remote -- very cool). We spent a pleasant afternoon adding extras like Hulu Desktop, a few interesting XBMC plug-ins, Firefox, and then adding apps to our Android phones to use them as XBMC remote controls over WiFi. A very satisfying project for a couple of geeky newlyweds. ;^)
XBMC: http://xbmc.org/
Giada N20 specs: http://www.giadapc.com/products/minipc/slim%20series/22.html
-MR
16 • @ 13 (by Anonymous on 2011-01-03 15:56:42 GMT from United States)
Linux is clean, that is why RHEL 6 has had more security advisories issued against it than Windows 7 in the same time period.
17 • #16 Linux security vs. Windows insecurity (by Caitlyn Martin on 2011-01-03 16:48:47 GMT from United States)
The difference between RHEL 6 and Windows 7 security advisories you list might just be accurate in terms of a count, but not in any other meaningful way. You didn't say which period of time you were looking at. Different time frames will yield different results. Without specifying the time period your statement is too broad to be accurate.
Even if your statement is accurate for a given period it does not mean that Windows is more secure. First, RHEL 6 is a brand new release and Windows 7 is not so discovery of more bugs and vulnerabilities at this stage is expected.. Second, Windows has more serious issues than RHEL 6 or, indeed, any Linux distribution. Third, part of the reasons flaws are found quickly and there is always a flurry of security advisories on a new Linux release is that there are many more eyes on the code. This is a huge advantage of FOSS over proprietary systems. Windows bugs can and do stay hidden longer for just that reason. Finally, Red Hat has a reputation for delivering errata very quickly while Microsoft has a reputation for being slow to patch and having a cavalier attitude towards security.
For all the reasons above Red Hat, flaws and all, is more secure that Windows will ever be. The mere fact that Windows apps often run with system privileges while equivalent Linux apps run with user privileges only is one of the main reasons *nix (Linux, BSD, MacOS, commercial UNIX) are all far safer and more secure than Windows.
18 • #16 (by Jokerboy on 2011-01-03 16:52:24 GMT from Romania)
year, right. http://kerneltrap.org/node/1584
and btw, linux!=OS.
19 • Page hit rankings (by Caitlyn Martin on 2011-01-03 17:06:47 GMT from United States)
I wholeheartedly agree with Ladislav's comments in the last paragraph of the piece on page hit rankings. DistroWatch mainly attracts home users and Linux hobbyists plus some newcomers looking for more information. I agree with not taking them too seriously as I doubt they reflect overall usage or viability of a distro.
For example, where is Android? It is on all sorts of netbooks and tablets nowadays, both of which count to desktop market share. It should show up somewhere but it does not. DistroWatch doesn't even count it as Linux but rather as "other operating systems" which are untracked.
There is exactly one billion dollar Linux company and that is Red Hat. Everybody uses Red Hat whether they realize it or not. Banks, utilities, government agencies, stock markets, airlines and a host of other businesses you likely interact with at some point in a given day all run Red Hat, which dominates the enterprise market. SUSE is a distant and fading second. Ubuntu, despite significant efforts by Canonical, is still not a significant player in enterprise space. IME Red Hat is also the leader among business distributions on the business desktop. The new $49 Desktop Edition of RHEL will help push that.
I dare say Mandriva will bounce back if they put out quality releases on a regular basis. The flight from Mandriva has been over the uncertainty surrounding the distro. Remove that uncertainty and many users will return, particularly if they are dissatisfied with whatever they moved on to.
20 • Bug reports (by Jesse on 2011-01-03 17:48:47 GMT from Canada)
Something I'd like to add to post 17, when comparing the number of bug reports between operating systems, it is also important to look at what is being covered. If you're looking at Windows 7 reports, you get the OS, some basic tools, not much else. With a platform like Red Hat, bug reports will include the base OS, the common tools, plus all of the software in their repository. RHEL has something like 4,000 packages to maintain, it stands to reason there will be more bugs with more software packages available.
The page hit ranks definitely do not reflect the usage of visitors to this site. Arch may be the most obvious example. The page hits put Arch at position 9, but the visitor stats page show Arch as being less than 0.1 per cent of the DW population.
21 • @16 security (by ix on 2011-01-03 17:53:05 GMT from Romania)
It's a silly comparison, really. You are comparing an operating system with thousands of official packages and a kernel full of open source drivers (RHEL) with Windows 7, in which you install apps from 3rd party sources and drivers from 3rd party sources. They have the most vulnerabilities, not the OS itself.
If you would include 3rd party apps and drivers, you would see that Windows 7 has much more vulnerabilities.
Some time ago, I made a comparison of the criticality of the vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel vs XP, Vista, and Mac OS X:
Linux: http://tinyurl.com/3xtexp8
XP: http://tinyurl.com/39oe3qx
Vista: http://tinyurl.com/2ut8gqx
Mac OS X: http://tinyurl.com/372w6vu
22 • #18, Technically correct, factually wrong (by Caitlyn Martin on 2011-01-03 17:57:24 GMT from United States)
and btw, linux!=OS.
Technically Linux is just the kernel. However, common usage is different. When most people, including technically knowledgeable ones, refer to Linux they mean the entire OS and applications bundled in a distribution. That usage of Linux applies equally to those who are technically astute and those who are not. It's also perfectly reasonable considering distros market themselves as Linux.
23 • Happy New Year to all! (by claudecat on 2011-01-03 18:21:53 GMT from United States)
I just want to thank Ladislav, Jesse, Caitlyn and anyone else involved for the wonder that is Distrowatch. It remains my eternal home page on each and every distro I install. The only possibly better site is www.dedoimedo.com. Won't even mention my own new blog - http://claudecat.wordpress.com/. Wait... did i just mention that?
24 • Zeigenstudios Distro Chooser (by Pearson on 2011-01-03 18:36:42 GMT from United States)
I used the distro chooser, to see what it would recommend (how well it matched my research). Based on my answers, it recommends Fedora or OpenSUSE. Fine, that's reasonable. But then it says Debian, Linux Mint, and a few others may not be sutable because "Your computer may be too slow". While I haven't used either Fedor or openSUSE, I don't get the impressition that they run any better on older computers than Debian or Linux Mint.
25 • Bottom Link Points To Previous Issue (by RHTopics on 2011-01-03 19:39:39 GMT from United States)
On the hompage, the bottom link for DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 386 points to:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20101220
The top link is of course correct.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110103
That through me off a little bit when I first clicked the bottom link.
Thanks for another interesting issue of DistroWatch Weekly.
26 • AntiX (by Tom on 2011-01-03 19:41:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
AntiX is excellent. My problems with it in 2007 are long gone now that it is so easy to download. I need to give it another go because i really enjoyed the OS. Yes, i would at least 2nd it for the prize now :)
Regards from Tom :)
27 • @ #2 & 16, security stuff (by Anonymous on 2011-01-03 20:12:38 GMT from United States)
When it comes to the question of problems OSes I think first that #2 should remember that OpenBSD code may or may not be ported into other BSDs, or given the nature of the BSD license it may well be in any number of OSes like Linux, Solaris, or most likely Mac OSX,which uses lots of BSD code and slaps a slick pricey exterior on top. Hell even MS Windows used BSD for at least a while (I'm looking @ you #16), so it's hard to say where such a thing could have ended up, if the reported backdoor even exists at all.
Also #16, in addition to the problems with what was implied in your statement mentioned previously you should also consider the number of patches in software and not just the number of vulnerabilities that are exposed. I for one like to poke my nose into the vulnerability statistics on web browsers on occasion and I think comparing IE to the rest of the browsers is very telling. Looking through Wikipedia's 'comparison of web browsers' page and updating the vulnerabilities section @ the bottom of the page as I am taken to do on occasion has given me a general impression of how MS treats security. Microsoft does tend to patch big problems in _relatively_ short order; however, most of their other bugs tend to linger and pile up until there is a mountain of little bugs. Apple has also left at least one security hole in Safari 5.x for just this side of forever. Most other browsers are patched in a matter of days or weeks, and they are all patched in total, so 0 bugs is the norm for Opera, Firefox, and Chrome. I still use Windows quite frequently, but I seriously doubt that MS is going to patch Win 7 in a manner altogether different than IE 7 & 8, and I would assume that an open source giant like Red Hat would act more like their open source counterparts at Mozilla who both aim for and generally achieve a bug free Firefox web browser, even if lots of bugs are found along the way.
28 • NetBSD (by El Chupacabra on 2011-01-03 22:14:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
I even noticed NetBSD is used in my new Sony DBP-S570 bluray player (with internet TV and 3D) .. I noticed flicking through the leaflets that came with it. It also contains Java for some reason ...
Regarding the comment above about BSD and the allegations of US government sponsoring (bribe?) weaker code in the network VPN subsystems .. the allegation, and that's all it is at the moment, is only for OpenBSD not NetBSD.
29 • Would this still be true? (by Anonymous on 2011-01-04 00:56:13 GMT from United States)
http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded/4027542/Linux-and-Security-Mission-Impossible?
30 • Re: 28 (by hob4bit on 2011-01-04 00:58:01 GMT from China)
Java is required on Bluray players for Digital Restriction Management
31 • Security (by Anonymous on 2011-01-04 02:09:03 GMT from United States)
Arguments about the relative security of Linux and other OSes gains little.
It is the integrity of the individual system that is the primary determining factor. Even among the DWW readers there is a wide variety of capabilities, and a huge disagreement about what is reasonable.
Some say it is reasonable to surf the web as root.
Some say it is reasonable to not provide Firefox updates in the secure repository. Some rely upon community repositories that bear the warning, "use at your own risk!". And some don't even care whether browser security updates are provided in any convenient fashion.
Some significant percentage of Linux users (10%?) - certainly users of some distros in the DW top 20 - are unreasonably vulnerable. Arguing about relative safety of these distros/users versus Windows is like debating the merits of the rhythm method versus withdrawal.
32 • Page ranks (by Jack on 2011-01-04 02:14:33 GMT from Canada)
Lol, Debian's stability is even evident among the page rank hits!
There is no such thing as software ... software is merely the current state of the hardware.
There is no such thing as hardware ... hardware is merely the current state of matter.
There is no such thing as matter ... matter is merely the current state of the universe.
There is no such thing as the universe ... the universe is merely the current state of ?
33 • Re: all the distros I ever ran and whether I liked it or not. (by I am the watchman on 2011-01-04 02:22:23 GMT from Canada)
1. First I ran Mandrake 10 or something but didn't like it. I had Windows XP too and I didn't like it.
2. Then I ran suse 9.1 pro and liked it. (I think I ran it but I can't remember for sure, but if I did I'm sure I would have liked it)
3. Then I ran suse 9.2 and liked it.
4. Then I ran suse 9.3 and liked it.
5. Then I ran Debian 3.0 and didn't like it. Later I would realize I should have liked it.
6. Then I ran Fedora 4 and didn't like it.
7. Then I ran FreeBSD 6.1 and liked it.
8. Then I ran Slackware at the same time as FreeBSD and liked it. I was also running Suse 10.0 at this time and I liked it. That was the only time I liked 3 different operating systems on my computer at the same time.
9. Then I only ran opensuse 10.1 and I didn't like it.
10. Then I panicked and ran Ubuntu 6.06 and thought I didn't like it. I later realized that I was being protective of my favorite suse 10.0. I was just jealous that it worked faster.
11. Then I ran Kubuntu and I didn't like it.
12. Then I ran Vector and I liked it.
13. Then I ran Yoper and didn't like it.
14. Then I ran Solaris and didn't like it.
15. Then I ran dynebolic and didn't like it.
16. Then I ran Zenwalk and I liked it.
17. Then I ran Pardus and didn't like it.
18. Then I ran Fox Desktop and didn't like it.
19. Then I ran open suse 10.2 and liked it.
20. Then I ran Ubuntu 7.04 and I liked it now.
21. Then I ran Debian and liked it this time. But now I was tired of configuring my computer.
22. Then I ran Ubuntu 7.04 and liked it again.
23. Then I ran opensuse 10.3 and liked it. But Firefox opened 0.4 seconds slower than Ubuntu so I didn't like it as much.
24. Then I remembered Firefox didn't open as fast on all my suse installations so I retroactively didn't like them as much. Except for suse 9.3 which I still liked.
25. Then I remembered I ran PCLinuxOs between 19 and 20 and I liked it a little but I was still protecting opensuse in my mind.
26. Then I remembered I ran Damn Small, Puppy, Frugalware, Xandros, SymphonyOS, and some other distros and some I liked and some I didn't like, but I mostly didn't like them.
27. Then I realized I was spending way too much time on the computer so I didn't like Linux anymore.
28. Then I installed windows xp on a spare partition and I kind of liked it again.
29. Then I contracted a virus on widows xp the next day and didn't like it anymore either.
30. Then I realized I tried to run plan 9 somewhere in there, and thought I would have liked it except I couldn't get it to run.
31. Then I realized I had wondered occasionally about running Gentoo but was glad I didn't because of some off-the-wall humour site that poked fun at Gentoo users because they thought they were the coolest.
32. Then I realized that at one time or another I had thought about installing Netbsd, openbsd, dragonfly bsd, centos, sidux and a bunch of other distros and retroactively disliked myself for spending way too much time thinking about linux and bsd's.
33. Then I thought about getting rid of my computer.
34. Then I decided to just run Ubuntu because I liked it.
35. Then I stopped thinking about linux so much and started living more day to day.
36. Then I realized that I didn't want to be a geek anymore.
37. P.S. I didn't like the name Iceweasel so that's why I liked Ubuntu better than Debian. But I like Debian's logo better. A decision had to be made.
38. Debian.
39. Now I like linux again.
34 • Re: 33 (by hob4bit on 2011-01-04 03:23:29 GMT from China)
Hi, well I had a similar story. First serious installed Linux distro was Mandrake 9.2. I hated Mandrake 10.0 and moved to Knoppix and then Debian 3 and back to Knoppix. Finally I have settled with Ubuntu since 8.04.
I am now using a self customized Ubuntu 10.04 which I install in a number of machines, virtual machines and even as a portable sfs file in a USB pen.
All the stuff I dislike in Ubuntu gets removed like Mono, Ubuntu 1 and I put in the stuff Ubuntu removed like Pidgin, GIMP etc... I also use the official Firefox 4.0beta, OpenOffice, Flash Player etc... My Firefox auto-updates from Mozilla website automatically. My USB sfs file is about 1.1GB when fully configured with all software I need.
There is no perfect distro that works best for everybody out of the box. Take a good long term support base like Ubuntu 10.04 and make your own mods is best. I am not in favour of rolling releases and have given up on the non LTS releases of Ubuntu.
At work we use CentOS 5.5, SLES and RHEL. OpenSuSE gives us lots of problems and we do not support Fedora for our software.
35 • gtkpod/X-moto (by Tuan on 2011-01-04 03:24:32 GMT from Brazil)
The link to Gtkpod homepage has an extra "h" at the beginning.
I recommend X-Moto for the next donation.
36 • NetBSD (by Mike on 2011-01-04 05:08:58 GMT from United States)
I just wanted to say thank you for taking time to review NetBSD. It is too bad that some troubles prevented a more in-depth review but it was still interesting, especially the interview. Anyway it is articles like this that keep me coming back each week. I am a little unhappy with most of the linux distros out there so I think it's time to try out NetBSD on an old laptop.
37 • DWW (by win2linconvert on 2011-01-04 06:21:56 GMT from United States)
Well as usual, a very interesting issue of DWW and a very contentious comments section after. I love this site! Err... I really enjoy this site. I don't even understand half of what some of you are saying and I still enjoy each edition of DWW and especially the comments. Especially #33. I can't believe I sat here and read the whole thing. What..? I don't have a problem...
P.S. The submit a comment section doesn't show up in Opera 11. Anybody got any idea why? I gotta get this fixed. It's my favorite browser.
Thanks
win2linconvert
38 • RE: 17/22 - 20 (by Landor on 2011-01-04 07:43:56 GMT from Canada)
#17/22
(disclaimer: I am in no way defending MS or Windows..lol)
I don't think it's actually fair to say his comment was too broad to be accurate, to only make some statements yourself that don't really explain much, or can't truly be backed up. First saying Windows has more issues than Linux isn't very accurate. It is yes, but isn't as well. What issues? Where? How?
Then there's the statement about so many eyes on the code. That in theory is a good statement but can you prove there are more people physically looking at specific pieces of code in Linux that found bugs than there are for Windows? While everyone is able to look at the code it doesn't mean that everyone does, and it doesn't mean that all that do look at it understands it. So, it's not very accurate. It's true in theory, but not accurate at all unless you can say X-amount vs X-amount with firsthand evidence.
I think we need to be a lot more clear with things now when it comes to using the term Linux. I've made an effort to change how I use it now because the term has become quite clouded. Android is a perfect example. How many people talk about massive amounts of people having Linux in their hands (because of their phones) and not knowing it? In our view of Linux they don't have Linux in their hand they just have the kernel buried under a pile of crap, a lot of which is proprietary from the various companies. That sure isn't Linux. Things get further skewed when you look at Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD. How many people would absently call it Linux in our community? I'm betting the majority, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. But because it's Debian most people would just say, "I'm running Debian kFreeBSD Linux", and be totally wrong.
A better way to describe things from now on would be to say an open source operating system using the Linux kernel. It's changed too much otherwise.
#20
While 4000 packages is a lot, it's also not that much. You have to factor in other desktops, multimedia applications, various office software, etc. While a base install could easily be a few 100 packages or less, a full dvd install could be well over a 1000, possibly 1000's, I haven't checked. To the point though, RHEL is supporting pretty close to a full OS install with a big chunk of those packages. It might not be 4000, it's still a lot. Without numbers though, you can't say it's a lot more than Windows. I'm stating this because you can't tell a person they're wrong without having the numbers to be able to specifically say X vs X as I said further above.
-----------
A side note, I finally picked up my new router/server and flashed it with TomatoUSB today. I blogged about it here: http://landorsplace.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/tomatousb-asus-rt-n16/
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
39 • package size (by Tom on 2011-01-04 08:16:18 GMT from United Kingdom)
I think number of packages can be misleading as a useful factor to judge an OS on.
Would it be worse to run 3 programs that are broken down into separate modules / packages with only 1 instance of any shared libraries / processes open in ram or would it be better to have ram clogged up with multiple instances of extremely similar stuff?
With 3 programs sharing 1 library only 1 version of that library needs to get updated for all 3 programs to feel the benefits. If each program had it's own version of that library and there was a security issue then getting all 3 patched would triplicate the workload.
I did once know a programmer that refused to work with objects and procedures. He even rejected loops preferring to just write everything out multiple times. His code did run VERY fast but there are disadvantages to that approach!
Regards from Tom :)
40 • Re #33 (by phap on 2011-01-04 08:33:28 GMT from Switzerland)
You made me laugh really loud thank you!
41 • #32 Answer? (by zygmunt on 2011-01-04 08:46:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Energy distribution.
42 • gtkpod (by a on 2011-01-04 09:16:40 GMT from Philippines)
invalid link for gtkpod- should be http://www.gtkpod.org and not hhttp://www.gtkpod.org
43 • @41 & @32 (by jake on 2011-01-04 10:29:13 GMT from United States)
41: Or lack thereof ... Entropy isn't just a good idea, it's the law!
32: Methinks you get it :-)
44 • Re #33 (by John on 2011-01-04 11:07:56 GMT from United Kingdom)
Brilliant!
45 • #17 (by :wq! on 2011-01-04 12:25:51 GMT from United States)
I'm no fan of Microsoft wares, but Charlie Miller might disagree with the statement that Mac is more secure than Windows. To the extent that Mac makes usage share gains, it becomes a more attractive target, and its security will increasingly be tested. Furthermore, Apple has chosen not utilize communities like the defunct OpenDarwin project in its ongoing developmental efforts.
46 • MoonOS (by Guy on 2011-01-04 12:30:59 GMT from United States)
Tried MoonOS. Looks great and very intuitive. This and Oz Unity are my favorites.
47 • @20 & @37 (by megadriver on 2011-01-04 12:48:07 GMT from Spain)
@20 As far as I know, Arch doesn't "advertise" itself in the browser's user agent by default, like many other distros do.
@37 Just have Opera identify itself as Firefox and it will show up. This was posted from Opera 11.
48 • Stats (by Eric Mesa on 2011-01-04 17:18:56 GMT from United States)
I think its' funny that most of the visitors are from Windows, but I understand why. Most people are either trying to figure out which Linux distro to use or are browsing at work.
But why in the world are there hits coming in from Windows 3.x and Windows 95?
49 • The answer.. (by Jack on 2011-01-04 17:30:43 GMT from Canada)
There is no such thing as the universe ... the universe is merely the current state of...Jake.
Or me or you or whoever. The universe wouldn't exist without you to make it exist...or would it?
Now that you're brain is fried, on to something Linux related :-)
I powered on my PC yesterday, only to be greeted by countless messages from libata ending in "status: {DRDY ERR}" and "error {UNC}" and dropping me to the maintenance prompt. It's extremely dry this time of year with winter and all, so I thought it might be static-related. A reboot didn't help, so I gave it the root password and took the suggestion that I should run fsck. As luck would have it, fsck was fscked, spewing out the same plethora of libata messages. Long story short, I downloaded a debian-live usb image and ran fsck from there. Everything seemed ok, no apparent data loss, rebooted, everything worked again. Powered off PC last night, rebooted this morning, same load of messages. The drive is a 2 year old 30GB SSD. Performance wise it's still faster than any platter based drive I've used, and I'm hoping it has a 2 year warranty. Time to go dig out the receipt.
50 • @48 (by Josh on 2011-01-04 19:06:52 GMT from United States)
Win 3.x and 95, I'm sure there are still users there. A relative of mine ran 98 up until about a year or 2 ago when they bought a new computer. Some people just don't think they need to upgrade since their computers work fine. And, running such old computers, its impossible to upgrade unless you buy a new one.
51 • @10 (by Jeff on 2011-01-04 22:35:48 GMT from United States)
rTorrent and libTorrent appear to be abandoned; the link to the Debian maintainer is dead and the new cutting edge package for Ubuntu is for Dapper Drake.
52 • btw (by fernbap on 2011-01-04 23:46:40 GMT from Portugal)
There is no such thing as people.
People are just the current state of organic compounds.
53 • RED Flag Warning (by RollMeAway on 2011-01-05 03:45:27 GMT from United States)
"The fact that Microsoft was leading the takeover of Novell’s patents was itself alarming to the open source community, but when it was revealed that Microsoft had recruited Oracle, Apple, and EMC to be co-owners of the patents, ...
"When have Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, and Apple found reason to work together previously? Why would this particular set of corporate giants be willing to go in together on this set of patents?"
http://ostatic.com/blog/osi-calls-for-scrutiny-of-cptns-patents-in-novell-deal
This could be devastating for linux distros.
54 • @51 rtorrent alive and well (by RollMeAway on 2011-01-05 05:06:33 GMT from United States)
Last release:
http://rakshasa.no/pipermail/libtorrent-devel/2010-October/002539.html
Project page:
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/
Once a project does what the author(s) intend it to do,
there is no need to "develop" it on a daily basis.
Unison and Grub 0.97 come to mind.
55 • Ubuntu release schedules (by Vishnu Rao on 2011-01-05 05:14:15 GMT from United States)
Just wanted to point out that the Ubuntu development release dates are listed wrong.
You have listed:
2011-01-27: Ubuntu 10.04.2
The release schedule lists as:
February 17th -->Ubuntu 10.04.2
Similarly Ubuntu 11.04 Beta
2011-04-21: Ubuntu 11.04 Beta
Actual: 2011-03-31
2011-04-21 is the Ubuntu 11.04 RC.
As always reading distrowatch weekly is something that I look forward to every week.Gives me at least one reason to look forward to a Monday.
56 • Linux Deepin 10.12 (by Linux2u on 2011-01-05 08:49:47 GMT from India)
Linux Deepin 10.12 looks awesome, great visual work I have seen ever
57 • Re: 49 & 52 (by jake on 2011-01-05 14:43:34 GMT from United States)
49: There is no Jake, just a jake. And I'm jake with that.
52: The sense of "self" transcends mere organic compounds ... Its kinda what makes us human. And if you squint at that thought sideways, it's why we shouldn't get over-emotional over computers and the code that makes 'em work. But that comment is probably too deep for this forum ...
58 • @54 (by Jeff on 2011-01-06 00:33:14 GMT from United States)
When a website has not been updated in five years, has dead links and is visibly outdated it looks abandoned.
59 • #58 (by anticapitalista on 2011-01-06 00:42:14 GMT from Greece)
How do you know that the site has not been updated in 5 years?
60 • #58 (by anticapitalista on 2011-01-06 00:43:13 GMT from Greece)
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/timeline
61 • #60 (by anticapitalista on 2011-01-06 00:44:30 GMT from Greece)
Sorry, I hit the enter by mistake. There should have been a ? to post 60
62 • RE: 60 (by Landor on 2011-01-06 01:28:19 GMT from Canada)
That's not a good example Anti. If you look at the tickets, a lot of the latest ones are spam. Since they've even been left there, that doesn't say a whole lot for the project. I only looked quickly, but I'm guessing it's either extremely inactive, or as people have said it's not worked on now.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
63 • @59 - 62 (by Womprat on 2011-01-06 12:31:13 GMT from Canada)
And when I'm illegally downloading movies, I very rarely see libtorrent clients. Maybe libtorrent users are not lawbreakers?
64 • I really like DW because........? (by sudonym on 2011-01-06 14:30:05 GMT from United Kingdom)
#57
'But that comment is probably too deep for this forum ...'
Well, that and other similar comments from you makes me question your motive for your involvement here. You certainly seem to begrudge the fact that someone may have a depth of knowledge/insight to rival yours.
You may give the impression of being frustrated when people appear to not "get it". Actually, I think it suits you just fine because it allows you to shake your head at how little they (therefore, how much I) know or are capable of comprehending (therefore, I am a bit special).
You see, even Landor is willing to offer help, whereas you seem only concerned with highlighting the extent of your knowledge, consequently at the expense of others.
Perhaps I am totally clueless, but I think it is fairly safe to assume that you are unlikely to be a contender for the all-time distro-hopper title - you've made it quite plain that slackware is the one for you. Nothing wrong with that, but why do you bother with Distrowatch at all? Okay, you may like to keep an eye on things but surely you are not limited to Distrowatch for that purpose. Besides, them pesky (DW forum) kids don't seem t'know a whole bunch. [1]
After suinting sideways at that for not very long at all, I'm a-thunkin' some durn varmint's aimin' t'hoodwink us all y'aall on account we ain't right grow'd up enough t'stand how dumb we all jim-bob in particular are - ain't thems the facts.........look out fer that 12 guage pump-action brain he's a-packin'
[1] Hang on......... p'raps I can appear more brightly by making them appear more dimly?
65 • re my previous (64) post (by sudonym on 2011-01-06 14:35:50 GMT from United Kingdom)
'After suinting sideways' obviously should read: squinting.
See, not as clever as I thought I was!
66 • @64 (by jacK on 2011-01-06 16:30:18 GMT from Canada)
Some people like to talk and be heard (Skypiness) and other people like to talk and be listened to (Skyp3nis).
67 • Re: #9 Backdoor (by Victor on 2011-01-06 17:28:55 GMT from United States)
'Do backdoors exist in most/many major OSes?'
Possibly they do, or can, but even more disturbing is:
Do backdoors exist in the processors?
We have probably all seen 'Intel Inside", could there be "Backdoor Inside"?
68 • @59 (by Jeff on 2011-01-06 23:45:39 GMT from United States)
When the newest version of Ubuntu mentioned is 6.06 and the current version is 10.10 and there are two releases a year what other conclusion can we reach ?
69 • Re: 64 (by jake on 2011-01-07 02:20:15 GMT from United States)
Re-read mine. I wasn't commenting on the readers, most of whom I enjoy reading. Rather, I was commenting on the forum. Think of it a gentle attempt at returning the subject matter back to Linux & FOSS in general. As for the rest of yours ... project much?
70 • Two libtorrents, maybe more? (by RollMeAway on 2011-01-07 02:41:46 GMT from United States)
@68 give a link to the page you are looking at please.
There appears to be AT LEAST two different libtorrent projects.
The one I mentioned above, last released 2010-10: (rtorrent, libtorrent)
http://rakshasa.no/pipermail/libtorrent-devel/2010-October/002539.html
This one: last release 2010-03 (libtorrent-rasterbar)
http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libtorrent/index.html
and perhaps the one you are looking at?
Confusion sets in, I don't think we are on the same page!
71 • @70 (by Jeff on 2011-01-07 03:48:26 GMT from United States)
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/
Where it says packages about 2/3 of the way down, Ubuntu Dapper is 6.06
and the link to the Debian maintainer is dead.
I have seen more than one dead project linger in limbo on trac
72 • @71 rtorrent libtorrent debian (by RollMeAway on 2011-01-07 06:16:26 GMT from United States)
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=rtorrent
and
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libtorrent11
show that debian is actively using these packages.
The 2010-10 release can be found in debian experimental.
Obviously nobody has updated the links you refer to, for a long time.
I could not find who the debian maintainer is, perhaps the dev could not either?
I use rtorrent often. It allows me to start a torrent via ssh remotely when
I have no GUI available.
Enough on this topic!
Carry on.
73 • @20 @47 (by Misfit138 on 2011-01-08 18:42:41 GMT from United States)
As @47 correctly indicated, Arch Linux is not identified by a browser's user agent by default. Therefore, most, if not all, Arch users would fall under 'GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)' which accounts for about 17% of the OSes.
74 • Linux Distributions (by RollMeAway on 2011-01-08 20:22:01 GMT from United States)
Here is an attempt to re-spark some discussions about distributions:
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/the-best-linux-distros-you-ve-never-heard-of-919411?artc_pg=1
Six pages of quick overviews for quite a few Linux Distributions.
There may be some new to you?
75 • RE: 74 (by Landor on 2011-01-08 22:05:33 GMT from Canada)
They need a different title for that article. I only noticed one that wasn't a well known distribution at one time or another.
It's one reason why I'm reading any Linux news or articles less and less. They're either full of opinion being passed off as news, or they're not really accurate/newsworthy in other ways. That's only to me though, I'm sure others find them informative, or enjoyable to read.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
76 • Linux Distributions (by Bangerhard on 2011-01-09 04:54:09 GMT from United States)
I usually find them informative, or enjoyable to read.
77 • variation of #74 (by Anonymous on 2011-01-09 14:24:41 GMT from Canada)
Perhaps someone could post a list of OS that do not use Mono.
If you do a search on google "apps using mono" you seem to get a lot of posts relating Android to mono
In a similar vein an article establishing (if possible) whether the so-called "drm": of Intel's "sandy bridge" cpu really has the ability to allow Intel to cut one off at the knees.
To show my complete ignorance of computers : can a "super computer" operating at a gazillion mhz be used to analyse (in a reasonable length of time) an ordinary linux OS to see if there are any "backdoors" or other gems like drm?
Thanks
78 • familiarity (by Tom on 2011-01-10 13:44:17 GMT from United Kingdom)
Landor, i agree. There were a number of distros that seemed new at first glance just because i have never tried them or only briefly or donkey's years ago but after a few seconds reflection realised that they are all here in DW aren't they?
SliTaz has saved my butt a number of times as Wolvix used to do. Yoper & Crux took me a moment to recognise but didn't Crux do a new release in the last couple of weeks?
Sys was the only one i had never heard of but most of them are really famous
Regards from Tom :)
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| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
| • Issue 1044 (2023-11-06): Porteus 5.01, disabling IPv6, applications unique to a Linux distro, Linux merges bcachefs, OpenELA makes source packages available |
| • Issue 1043 (2023-10-30): Murena Two with privacy switches, where old files go when packages are updated, UBports on Volla phones, Mint testing Cinnamon on Wayland, Peppermint releases ARM build |
| • Issue 1042 (2023-10-23): Ubuntu Cinnamon compared with Linux Mint, extending battery life on Linux, Debian resumes /usr merge, Canonical publishes fixed install media |
| • Issue 1041 (2023-10-16): FydeOS 17.0, Dr.Parted 23.09, changing UIDs, Fedora partners with Slimbook, GNOME phasing out X11 sessions, Ubuntu revokes 23.10 install media |
| • Issue 1040 (2023-10-09): CROWZ 5.0, changing the location of default directories, Linux Mint updates its Edge edition, Murena crowdfunding new privacy phone, Debian publishes new install media |
| • Issue 1039 (2023-10-02): Zenwalk Current, finding the duration of media files, Peppermint OS tries out new edition, COSMIC gains new features, Canonical reports on security incident in Snap store |
| • Issue 1038 (2023-09-25): Mageia 9, trouble-shooting launchers, running desktop Linux in the cloud, New documentation for Nix, Linux phasing out ReiserFS, GNU celebrates 40 years |
| • Issue 1037 (2023-09-18): Bodhi Linux 7.0.0, finding specific distros and unified package managemnt, Zevenet replaced by two new forks, openSUSE introduces Slowroll branch, Fedora considering dropping Plasma X11 session |
| • Issue 1036 (2023-09-11): SDesk 2023.08.12, hiding command line passwords, openSUSE shares contributor survery results, Ubuntu plans seamless disk encryption, GNOME 45 to break extension compatibility |
| • Issue 1035 (2023-09-04): Debian GNU/Hurd 2023, PCLinuxOS 2023.07, do home users need a firewall, AlmaLinux introduces new repositories, Rocky Linux commits to RHEL compatibility, NetBSD machine runs unattended for nine years, Armbian runs wallpaper contest |
| • Issue 1034 (2023-08-28): Void 20230628, types of memory usage, FreeBSD receives port of Linux NVIDIA driver, Fedora plans improved theme handling for Qt applications, Canonical's plans for Ubuntu |
| • Full list of all issues |
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| Random Distribution | 
Descent|OS
Descent|OS was an Debian-based desktop Linux distribution featuring a traditional desktop environment (GNOME 2 in the 2.x series, MATE in later versions). The project's mission was to provide an intuitive and modern desktop environment anybody can use.
Status: Discontinued
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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0x969CD4E778C7b6549A2B00e34114e0168c86A542 
